


Christmas Is Over

by telm_393



Category: Deadpool (2016), Deadpool - All Media Types
Genre: Ableism, Bittersweet, Break Up, Caretaking, Character Study, Complicated Relationships, Disability, Ethical Dilemmas, F/M, Falling Out of Love, Friendship/Love, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Memory Issues, Mental Health Issues, Relationship Study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-13
Updated: 2016-04-13
Packaged: 2018-06-02 00:12:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6542467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/telm_393/pseuds/telm_393
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes maximum effort isn't enough, and giving up is the best option.</p><p>Vanessa breaks up with Wade, but he saw it coming. There is no villain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Vanessa

**Author's Note:**

> Hoooooo boy, this one's rough. I call it the "Brutally Honest Moral Conundrum Break Up Fic", except that's a mouthful. It's just...there's a world where Wade and Vanessa don't work out, and also ethics and moral obligation and possible immorality of moral obligation and also narrative conventions are involved. 
> 
> There are kind of vaguely complex moral issues here, so the extra warnings are a little confused, and in the end notes.
> 
> In any case. This isn't a happy fic, but it's not meant to be depressing, y'know?

Vanessa hates knowing when it’s time to give up, but if all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again, she’s sure as hell not going to.

+

First thing’s first: Wade died.

He was dead for a year, and just because he technically wasn’t doesn’t mean that Vanessa didn’t grieve for that fucking idiot who just _left her_. It didn’t mean that she didn’t spend every fucking second of every fucking day for fucking _months_ wishing it had turned out different, wishing she’d had those last precious weeks with Wade. It doesn’t mean she didn’t cry rivers and ruin her make-up a million times. She always forgot to get the waterproof kind, because she’d never had to before.

She was never a crier.

She guesses Wade changed her.

She changed him.

It’s how things work sometimes.

They weren’t big changes. It’s not like they were suddenly good people or anything. They were just in love, and being in real, actual love changes you, not even necessarily in bad ways. Vanessa hadn’t known that before she met Wade. She fell for him when she suspected that “being in love” was just a prettier way of saying “being in pain”, a slave to feelings that made you think some asshole could _really be different this time, Nessa._ She’d always had the suspicion that the super special romantic love everyone was always harping about wasn’t worth it at all.

Of course, back then, she’d never been in love.

That’s why she hadn’t realized that that was what was happening with Wade, because he was a good guy and falling in love didn’t hurt in a bad way. It happened hard and fast, but that was how they liked it.

The year they spent stupid in love was the most perfect almost-year of her life, right up until everything got torn up by _fucking_ cancer. Right up until his dumbass, misguided heroic tendencies (and God, those were just the worst fucking gift that kept on giving) decided that it made sense to leave just so she wouldn’t have to see him die.

It was worse to be left hanging.

That perfect almost-year, though?

It was worth it.

So after a while, she started packing away his stuff. Not throwing it away, but putting it in storage, because Wade loved clutter but Vanessa couldn’t handle looking at the million and one things he’d collected. After a while, she was able to look through those boxes and smile. Even laugh. But first she put it away.

She went back to work after she finally decided that waiting for him at their—her—apartment all day, Wham! on repeat, was pathetic, because even if Wade came back—and he wouldn’t—it’s not like he wouldn’t wait for her until she came home.

Then, after a while, she stopped hoping Wade would be there when she came home from work.

Eventually, the yawning hole in her heart that was Wade Wilson started patching itself, becoming easier to live with, and his absence didn’t choke her anymore, didn’t fill the whole world up.

She started wearing his coat and the Voltron ring once she finally could without her heart getting broken over and over again; and the coat and the ring reminded her of him and how he’d been worth all of this pain for the time she had with him. They had comforted her.

By the time he came back, she’d pretty much accepted that he was gone.

That didn’t stop her from getting excited at the idea that the impossible could have happened, that the man she fell in love with (maybe still _was_ in love with) could be alive, that somehow, in some way, they were getting a second chance.

Then through the big damn battle and the elation and the adrenaline and the sudden knowledge that it was her dead fiancé killing people like it was his job (because it was) in a weirdly sexy red suit and the anger at his dumb ass for leaving her and then being alive and not telling her about it she still thought, _second chance, second chance, second chance._

She didn’t believe him, when he said how bad he looked. She thought he was just being dramatic, he was always a dramatic kind of guy. But it really was that bad.

She’d kissed him anyway, because she was drunk on adrenaline and because she loved him, no matter what kind of love it turned out to be.

She’d kissed him, and her eyes had been closed, so it’d been easy to think, _Maybe this won’t be that different. Maybe we can pick up where we left off._

Fucking idiot.

+

A lot can happen in a year.

A year can make someone a stranger.

A year of torture, of some dickhead tap-dancing your sanity into mush, of murder after murder after murder—it could make anyone a stranger.

It doesn’t do that to Wade.

He’s still Wade, and she knows that. It’s not hard to tell. His smile is the same, even if the skin around it isn’t, and his jokes are still really fucking funny (when she understands them, but sometimes she doesn’t, and that’s one of the first signs that things aren’t picture perfect, they’ll never be), and he’s still good to her, still her good guy, he still loves her, and—

Among all the things that’ve stayed the same, the differences are glaring. The scars, first. Then, even worse, the scars on his mind, the way his crazy’s far outstripped her crazy, the way he’s won the “who has it worse?” game twenty times over and left her in the dust.

Wade’s always been the kind of guy who’ll chatter away at anyone, including himself, but now when he talks to himself, he’s—not.

He’s talking to the fucking boxes, or to the _audience,_ whoever they are. He understands that no one else sees or hears the boxes, and no one else thinks they’re in a movie or comic or fanfiction or whatever the fuck it is this week, but that’s all he understands. He still thinks the boxes are real, he still thinks there’s a fourth wall to break, he just figures he’s the only one who knows it, who can sense it.

Vanessa doesn’t live in Wade’s reality anymore. She wishes she did.

Another thing that hurts so much it physically _burns_ is how he forgets things, how he gets confused. It’s a toss-up, with him, what month it is, what year it is, where he is. Worse, there are memories that she has that he should be able to share but _can’t_. Sometimes they have a conversation and by the end of it, he’s forgotten she’s even there.

Of course, that’s when they can hold a conversation at all.

+

It’s not his fault.

That makes it so much worse, because it makes Vanessa the villain in this story.

+

Something Vanessa knows: if you live with a sick person, you’ve got to take care of them, and Vanessa could do it when Wade was going to either get cured or die, but now he’s never gonna get cured, and literally never going to die.

Look, it’s not like she wanted him to die back then or wants him to die now, but she’d been willing to take care of him when she knew for a fact that it would be over soon. She wanted it to end in the cure, but she knew how else it could, and no matter what, she was secure in the knowledge that it would _end._

Turns out Vanessa’s not someone you can really count on when things get hard, not when it’s _forever._

+

Sometimes when Wade’s not lucid, Vanessa wants to just yell, _Why can’t you stop being Deadpool? Why can’t you just be like you used to be?_

She wants to yell at him a lot, but she keeps her mouth shut. She never used to have to do that around Wade.

Vanessa can’t be what he needs in a romantic partner, not anymore, and he can’t be what she needs. Maybe things would be different if she was still in love with him.

Maybe she’d still be in love with him if he hadn’t come back like this.

(And isn’t that just a shitty fucking thing to think? She doesn’t want him to be dead, fuck no, she loves him and would rather have him here than not, but she’s not _that_ good a person, so she still wishes he hadn’t gotten scarred, hadn’t lost his mind.)

Maybe.

None of those maybes matter when everything’s stripped away and the truth is right there: Vanessa _isn’t_ in love with Wade anymore, even though she’s been trying.

Vanessa doesn’t want to be with him forever as husband and wife.

Vanessa can’t be the emergency contact. 

Honestly, she’s not sure if _he’s_ even in love with her or just the her he left hanging months and months ago. All she knows for a fact is that they do love each other, and if they keep this relationship up, it’ll ruin what they can have, the love that comes with the kind of intimacy that you only have once in a lifetime, the fond, friendly love.

Because Vanessa will get _bitter._ That’s what happens when you forget that someone’s a person and they become a responsibility instead. You get bitter. She doesn’t want to be that person. She doesn’t want to be the kind of shitty person that sees another human being as a burden, and she knows that’s _exactly_ what she’d become. Why would she inflict that on herself just because she wants to still be in love with him, just because she wants to be good enough to be patient and kind?

Why would she inflict that on _Wade?_

She’ll fuck himup. He’ll fuck her up too, but she’s honestly more afraid of the other thing, because it turns out that now that Wade is indestructible, he’s more breakable than he’s ever been. He’s unpredictable and unstable, not just to the world but to _Vanessa,_ and Vanessa doesn’t know how to get through to him anymore, not like she used to.

Vanessa can’t be the Devoted Wife That Stays Because He Needs Her. She’s not that kind of woman, and she’s definitely not that kind of asshole.

Wade cares about her, and she knows he would try to help her if she had problems, that he’d want to fix them. It would fucking destroy him to realize that _he_ was a problem.

So she keeps telling herself that she can’t do that to him, to her, to _them_ , especially when there’s a perfectly okay future where Wade Wilson _isn’t_ a problem, he’s a _friend._

She knows what she has to do, but she’s still trying to find the courage to say goodbye to the her and him that wanted to spend the rest of their lives together, now that she knows the truth.

Wade is the man she fell in love with, but he isn’t the man she was in love with. Not anymore, and never again.

+

In a movie, the villain is the one who leaves the person who she should be strong enough to love. The villain is the person who gives up. In the real world, sometimes the villain is the one who stays.

Vanessa lives in the real world.


	2. Wade

Wade doesn’t understand Vanessa as well as he used to, now that he gets confused easier and they spend less time together and time feels like some kind of fucked up alternate universe bullshit.

Wade used to know what Vanessa was saying most of the time, not less than half the time.

She used to know what he meant too.

Now, though, with the boxes and the weird freakouts and the memory stuff, with the concentration issues (that he remembers having since forever that made everything hard to follow except for a few all-consuming things) so much worse now—she doesn’t see him the same anymore, and she doesn’t understand him anymore, or want him. He can see it in her smile and hear it in her laugh and feel it in the way she hesitates before kissing his ruined skin.

He tells her he gets it if she’s grossed out, he knows it’s really bad, but she brushes it off and doesn’t like bringing it up. She has a couple shots before they have sex, not enough to get drunk, but enough to loosen up, and it’s not even close to the same, because they’re not…

Wade doesn’t know if he’s in love anymore. He’s not sure of much of anything anymore. When he wasn’t with her, he had her, but not _her_ , not this version of her, the real one, the new one.

And she, she had him pressed in bronze, memories of a guy with a bangin’ body that _wasn’t_ covered in scar tissue on fucking scar tissue and the face of an angel and…and _eyebrows._ All Wade has left is his bangin’ body, and not even his great ass can make up for how much everything else has been fucked every way imaginable.

Wade knows, in some vague way, that Vanessa isn’t in love with him anymore, even if he’s not sure when it happened, and he kinda knows that he’s probably not in love with her anymore either. Their love story was from Before.

Now it’s more like a really disappointing sequel.

Wade thinks Vanessa doesn’t know he knows this.

That’s probably just another reason why their days as Wadessa are numbered.

They’re just not in sync anymore.

+

No way he’s gonna be the one who breaks up, though. _No_ way.

He doesn’t have the balls.

Vanessa can do it.

+

The last limping legs of their romance give out on what’s supposed to be a special day.

+

It’s their anniversary, and Wade gets Vanessa a necklace, one with as many diamonds as possible, because he’s hoping he really did just forget that he’s in love with her and he’s gonna remember now, and besides, that engagement was beautiful, okay, and he wants things to be beautiful again. He wants to rewind to the moments right before everything was ruined, to the very last time he and Vanessa were happy without sickness fucking everything up.

Wade’s been preparing for this anniversary for six weeks, ever since he realized it was coming. It’s lucky that he figured it out so much time in advance, so he could remember to definitely not forget. Wade’s not usually that lucky when it comes to his brain, these days, but on that day, he just knew. He had a thought and a feeling and it had to do with the engagement and he put two and two together and—

He thinks, too hopefully, that this might be what starts fixing him and Vanessa, what makes them remember if they’re in love. _That_ they’re in love.

Vanessa’s sitting on the bed when he walks into the apartment, and when he says, “Knock knock?” she looks up and smiles.

He knows, somewhere in his gut, that she used to smile at him different, special, and she doesn’t ask _who’s there?_

“I have something for you!” Wade sing-songs, proud of himself and maybe a little (a lot) smug.

Her smile trembles, but she holds her hands out. “Gimme.”

He bounces over to the bed, excitement all bubbly in his chest, and gives her the box.

She doesn’t tear the wrapping paper like he vaguely remembers she used to, instead she peels the paper back, hesitant, and when she opens the box, her fingers just hover and flinch above the necklace, suspended in time and space, like she’s scared to touch it. Wade doesn’t remember Vanessa ever being scared of anything, but now he can see that she is most of the time. It makes him scared too.

“Well, you still know what I like,” she says very softly.

He beams. “I just found the shiniest, diamondiest thing.”

Her smile goes totally wobbly now, like it’ll melt off her face. “I wanted to talk. That’s why I called you over.”

Wade frowns. “What kind of talk?” he asks suspiciously.

“The…we need to talk kind of talk.”

Wade feels numb. Yellow tells White to give him five bucks, he knew this was gonna happen in the next week, _ha._ White tells him they never had a bet going, and he doesn’t have five bucks, because they’re boxes. What would Yellow do with five bucks anyway? Yellow says he was making a point. White says it was a stupid one.

Wade shakes his head like that’ll actually drive the boxes away instead of just making them dizzy for a while, and says, disappointed, “On our anniversary?”

Now Vanessa’s not even trying to smile. She looks like Wade slapped her. Maybe he did, and he just forgot? His heart picks up, and he asks, panicked, “Did I hit you?”

But she just looks confused. And sad. Mostly, she looks sad. “No. I just…what anniversary, Wade?”

Wade’s kinda taken aback by that, honestly, considering how he’s usually the one who forgets things. He’s vaguely offended, honestly.

“Of when we got engaged,” he says, and manfully resists the urge to tack on _duh_ to the end of that sentence.

“When we got engaged,” Vanessa says numbly, and her fingers go slack so the present tumbles to the floor. The string of diamonds catches the remnants of daylight spilling in through the window, and they glint like a broken disco ball.

Wade thinks Vanessa might be talking, and he tries to beat the now more intrusive boxes away to pay full attention to her, because she deserves full attention, especially when she’s about to break up with him.

But his gaze keeps getting pulled to the diamonds shining on the floor, and Wade’s always been easily distracted.

“Wade? Wade!”

“Whuh?” he asks. The boxes have faded and now there’s Vanessa. He looks at her intently, wishing he had his mask on so she could forget how much uglier he’s become. Once, he tried to memorize every bit of her face. He remembers that. He did memorize her, he thinks. At least, the face she had right then. He remembers herin that moment, asking about plans A through Z while he tried to be angry or something that wasn’t lost and sad and small; even if he forgets that her hair is shorter (or longer?) now and she’s gotten older.

“Wade!”

Wade snaps back to the real world, to the conversation, because they’re having a conversation, because Vanessa’s not a statue, not a work of art, and she’s not a memory. He can’t study her and not listen, she’ll know.

Vanessa’s voice is ragged and her mascara’s started to smudge and this is it. Wade thinks he knew this was coming. At least, now that he’s here, he knew this was coming.

“Are you with me?” Vanessa asks, and the question’s got a hopeless edge to it, like she won’t believe him if he says he is.

“Of course,” he says anyway. “Yeah, I’m here, nowhere else I’d be.”

“What about…” Vanessa starts, and then she raises her hands and puts them on the side of his head like she’s going to kiss him, but she doesn’t and he doesn’t dare try and close the gap. “Here?”

“…Where?”

“Your head.”

“Everyone lives in their head, don’t they?”

“What about the real world, Wade? What does your head tell you about that? I don’t _know_ anymore, and it kills me. I love you, it’s just, I don’t know if we’re really together anymore. If we match.”

“Like the curvy pieces.”

“You remember that?”

“Um, duh? Why wouldn’t I?”

Vanessa’s breath skips. “Did you not hear me? Wade, our anniversary was six weeks ago.”

“Oh,” Wade says very quietly. He feels like he’s been kicked in the nads.

The nads of his heart.

“I thought it was today,” he says uselessly.

“I know,” Vanessa says, like the knowing is the worst part, and now the tears are really coming, rolling down her cheeks and making her eyes puffy and her mascara look really, _really_ bad, and she’s still beautiful.

He never deserved her.

“I’m sorry?” he says hopefully, like saying an apology without even knowing why he’s saying it will change a single goddamn thing. It didn’t when he was a kid, and it doesn’t now. There are hot tears running down his cheeks, stinging his scars. He doesn’t care.

“No,” Vanessa chokes out before she takes a deep breath and leans her forehead against his, hands still on his head. It’s a weird kind of contact, but better than none. “Don’t be. No one should be sorry. No one did anything wrong. I’m the villain here, but no one _actually_ did anything wrong.”

“You’re not a villain, Vanessa. Did you sprout horns and change your name to Francis in the last two seconds or something?” Wade’s joke splats right onto the floor. His boxes groan. Yellow boos.

Vanessa, because she’s still perfect, laughs, tiny and miserable. “No. It’s just that the girlfriend who doesn’t stay when her boyfriend gets…” she trails off.

Wade helps her finish: “…gets turned into the lovechild of a dalmatian and the demon who gets his lunch money stolen by all the other demons?”

She snorts and says, “You said it, not me. Anyway, the girlfriend that leaves is always the villain. The shallow chick who couldn’t deal. I want to be your friend, Wade, I don’t want that to stop, but I can’t…”

“Deal.”

Vanessa takes a deep, shuddering breath, and says, “Do you remember what happened when we got engaged?”

“The Ring Pop and the proposal and you said yes and then I had cancer?”

“Yeah. You remember what you said?”

Wade furrows his brow (which, by the way, looks pretty weird without eyebrows) and tries not to let on that he has to try to remember.

He thinks Vanessa knows anyway, because she waits until he finally manages to solidify one of those less-solid wisps of memory threaded through that almost-perfect night. Christmas. It was Christmas. “Marry me? Your crazy matches my crazy? The puzzle? What was it?”

“The second one.”

Wade feels sick. No, he feels _sad._ Just sad. All of this is just really fucking sad.

He knows what she means. “Our crazy doesn’t match anymore.”

“I’m so sorry, Wade. I love you, just not…I didn’t fall in love with you when you were like this, and I didn’t let you go but I moved on and I fell out of love and I can’t stay just because you’re…fuck, Wade, we just don’t…match. We can’t be what each other needs anymore.”

“I don’t even know what I need anymore.”

“All I know is I don’t think you need me as a girlfriend. Wade, I can’t let us get married or something, because I love you too much and I love me too much to let us be all miserable and…Wade, if you don’t fit me anymore, I don’t fit you either, and I can’t pretend to, and…I’m scared of just hurting you more. I don’t…I don’t want to break you.”

“I’m not an egg.”

“Maybe you kind of are, right now. And you’re already all cracked and…I don’t want to leave little pieces of your shell everywhere.”

The words are kind of slurred because Vanessa’s started crying again, but Wade gets it. He was a puzzle piece, but Weapon X and time made him into an egg that’s already cracked, and Vanessa’s still a puzzle piece, but older and a little bent so she’s not the same shape as before anyway, and if you stick a puzzle piece into a cracked egg, all the yolk just comes out and leaves the puzzle piece sticky and gross and the egg broken and empty.

But…

“I don’t want you to leave,” Wade whispers, and his voice comes out so thin and scared and broken through his fucked up throat that it makes him wince. He sounds like a little kid that smokes like a pack a day.

Vanessa pulls away from their previous position and wraps him in a hug in a couple fluid motions. Sometimes she’s almost as graceful as him.

She holds him like he might break. He still holds her like she won’t.

“I’m not gonna leave you,” she whispers fiercely, with an edge to her voice that betrays annoyance at him not understanding yet again. “That’s not what I’m trying to say. I want to be your friend, but I can’t…I can’t be in love with you, I can’t be your wife, I can’t…I can’t take care of you. I wouldn’t be any good at it.”

“I love you, Vanessa,” Wade says, though he’s not even sure what he means by it.

“I know. I love you too, just not…Wade, if we still have those feelings for each other, we have to _not_. I can’t do this. I still want to be friends, just…I can’t be the emergency contact. Even if that means you won’t have one. It’s still better that way, you know?”

Not completely, but he thinks eventually he’ll understand. Or forget. Instead of saying much of anything, he tightens his hold on her and says, “We’ve never been just friends before, have we?”

“No,” Vanessa agrees. “We haven’t. But things have changed.”

Wade murmurs, “Ain’t that the truth.”

The diamonds are still lying sadly on the floor, dull under the dim moonlight.

Wade wonders who’s gonna pick them up.

**Author's Note:**

> Attempted Warnings/Explanations: There's discussed/referenced abuse that has to do with nondisabled caretakers of disabled people. However, those references and discussion are based around avoiding potential abusive/unhealthy situations. Ableism is a thing here, and it is complicated by having a character who knows she can't handle having a disabled partner, but who just wants to do what's best for her *and* him, and knows that "what's best" wouldn't be staying with someone due to a sense of obligation.
> 
> Also, sometimes things just don't work out. 
> 
> For minor warnings: there's very, very, very lightly referenced or implied past domestic violence and/or child abuse. Like, at a couple points so lightly referenced/implied that you might not notice it.


End file.
